Recently the IE dev blog announced that IE 8 has passed the acid 2 test. In a recent Half Nutlog post we talked about how Opera is suing Microsoft because of Internet Explorers lack of support for web standards. We’ll our dreams may be coming true for IE and web development. If all browsers supported the standards no more would we have to detect for functionality and worry about how our content will look in different browsers. Oh what a joyful day it would be for that to happen!

The New York Times just released their list of 53 Places to Go in 2008.
Well worth checking out I think.

Passengers on JetBlue Airways Flight 641 from New York JFK to San Francisco Tuesday morning will be the first to have access to the carrier’s new inflight Internet service, which will allow customers with Wi-Fi enabled laptops or one of two BlackBerry models to log on to Yahoo! Mail and Messenger or their personal e-mail accounts (via PDA).

JetBlue subsidiary LiveTV paid $7 million for a 1-MHz block of former Verizon Airfone wireless spectrum auctioned off by the US Federal Communications Commission last year. The size of that spectrum will not allow passengers full access to the World Wide Web or e-mail attachments, but it is large enough to handle the limited capabilities that will feature on Tuesday’s flight. The A320, which joined the fleet this year and has been renamed for the BetaBlue product, will have three Wi-Fi access points installed behind the ceiling panels and an onboard server. A JetBlue spokesperson told ATWOnline that the installation is a “lightweight version of what’s needed” and does not include any heavy equipment that might be difficult to install or increase fuel burn.

Recently I was reading part of SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible by Jerri L. Ledford.

In Chapter 3 in the Understanding Usability section he hits on something I think is absolutely correct. If you’ve read much of the Nutlog at all you’ll know I’m not a huge Flash fan. Used in the right place (showing movies, i.e. YouTube) it serves it’s purpose, but in 99% of the cases I’d say it’s abused. Mr. Ledford makes the following point.

“Web-site users are impatient. They don’t like to wait for pages to load, they don’t want to deal with Flash graphics or JavaScript, and they don’t want to be lost. These are all elements of usability — how the user navigates through and uses your web site. And yes, usability has an impact on SEO. Especially from the perspective of your site links and loading times

When a search engine crawler comes to your site, it crawls through the site, looking at keywords, links, contextual clues, meta and HTML tags, and a whole host of other elements. The crawler will move from page to page, indexing what it finds for inclusion in search results. But if that crawler reaches the first page and can’t get past the fancy Flash you’ve created, or if it gets into the site and finds links that don’t work or that lead to unexpected locations, it will recognize this and make note of it in the indexed site data. That can damage your search engine rankings.”

This is exactly my point. If I have to study to hard or decipher the images or animation in a Flash movie for navigation or site content, forget about it, I’m leaving!